On July 3, the quarantine officer, flanked by bail bondsmen, returned to court to learn his fate. His opponents were confident. But when Judge Morrow took his place on the bench, he delivered a surprise reprive: Kinyoun’s travel ban—because it was general and not racially focused—hadn’t violated the court’s ruling against unlawful imprisonment. In any event, the ban was rendered moot by President McKinley’s order. Now Kinyoun was cleared of contempt charges. Stunned, he walked out of court a free man. Free, but despised. On Independence Day, news of his freedom was buried in the newspapers’ back pages, among reports of shipwrecks.23
Kinyoun hoped to consult Judge Morrow on matters of public health but never managed to catch him at his office. He left his card. One night, he was startled to see the white-haired jurist join him in line for the Angel Island ferry.
Kinyoun and the judge sat down together in the cabin of the ferry as it churned north. Amid a crowd of bay commuters, the two men huddled from the San Francisco waterfront to the shores of Tiburon.
Judge Morrow lectured Kinyoun on the line between federal and state control of public health. Kinyoun, in turn, schooled the judge about the dangers of plague. The judge was impressed enough to ask Kinyoun to help him obtain a new kind of rat poison. As the ferry docked, Kinyoun exulted that he’d made the judge see the light.24
But Kinyoun’s détente with the judge failed to soften the city’s antipathy. Calls grew louder for Kinyoun to leave town. In City Hall, the board of supervisors considered a motion to fire the city board of health, his last scientific allies.
OUST THE FAKERS, demanded the Call’s editorial page. “On all grounds, the board and Kinyoun should step down.”25
White Men’s Funerals
UNTIL AUGUST 1900, the plague had claimed only Chinese victims. A rough-hewn teamster named William Murphy would change all that.
By day Murphy drove a horse carriage, making deliveries in Chinatown. At night he put down his reins and picked up an opium pipe, escaping from his daily rut of mud and manure into a vaporous dreamscape.
One day, he felt a rush of fever. His head pounded and his body hurt as though he’d been beaten in a bar brawl. He sweated and shivered convulsively, his thirty-four-year-old drayman’s frame now weak as a babe’s.
Light-headed and woozy, he dragged himself from his Dupont Street apartment to the City and County Hospital at 26th and Potrero Streets. The doctors made puzzled stabs at a diagnosis. On August 11, William Murphy died. An autopsy revealed him to be the city’s first white victim of bubonic plague.1
Joseph Kinyoun studied the specimens with a grim vindication. “It is the most beautiful case of plague infection (if such things can be called beautiful) that I have encountered in this epidemic,” he said.2 Murphy’s death expanded the outbreak beyond people of Asian blood, but it was Anne Roede’s that transcended the boundaries of Chinatown.
Anne Roede, a white nurse, was called to Pacific Avenue to tend a teenage boy suffering from stomach pains and respiratory distress. It was a presumed case of diphtheria. As Nurse Roede bent over his bedside, the boy was seized with nausea. Too quick for her to dodge, he heaved and spattered the nurse’s face. She cleaned her patient, then composed herself as best she could.
Forty-eight hours later, Nurse Roede felt her own face grow flushed, her throat thick and raw. Her strength swooned, and her breath became labored. Doctors admitted her to the contagious disease ward of Children’s Hospital on California Street, another suspected case of diphtheria. Her fever soared. After hovering three days on the fringes of consciousness, the twenty-eight-year-old nurse suffocated.
The doctors moved her body to the Children’s Hospital morgue for autopsy and began their postmortem. Only when they looked into her lungs did they realize that Nurse Roede had died of pneumonic plague.
Panic-stricken hospital administrators decided that their morgue was contaminated and that it must be burned. As the fire engines pulled up and prepared to torch the room, someone called for coal oil to drench the floor. The oil was stored in the next room, amid a huge powder keg of flammable fuels—enough to engulf the whole hospital and all of California Street in flames. At the last moment, the fire was canceled. “If it had been started after that manner,” Kinyoun reflected, “all the fire engines in San Francisco would not have saved the Children’s Hospital.”3
Nurse Roede’s teenage patient died and was buried without an autopsy. Kinyoun was convinced that his killer was pneumonic plague and that he had infected Nurse Roede. He was even more convinced that a chain of such misdiagnoses was concealing the true size of the outbreak. “There have been more cases of bubonic plague… in San Francisco than have seen the light,” he wrote. “Either deliberately or unintentionally cases of bubonic plague have been returned to the Health Office under another name.”4
But plague was only part of his job. Quarantine duties had kept him very busy. In just over a year as San Francisco’s quarantine officer, Kinyoun had overseen the inspection of more than one thousand ships, during which more than fourteen thousand passengers had been disinfected.5 Clad in oilskins, the quarantine officers were required to board ships in the bay until nine or ten o’clock at night, breasting the whitecaps, hauling fumigation equipment aboard, smoking and spraying the fetid compartments. They checked passengers and crew, taking temperatures, peering into throats, and palpating glands in the neck to search for any signs of illness aboard ship. Passengers were always restive in quarantine, bridling at the health and baggage checks. It was a wet, grueling, thankless job.
But no ship made waves like the Occidental and Oriental Steam Ship Co. vessel the Coptic. She regularly plied the sea lanes from San Francisco through Honolulu and Kobe, Japan, to China, returning with her hold full of China tea, Hawaiian sugarcane, crates of Asian-Pacific delicacies—water chestnuts, yams, green ginger, taro root, lily bulbs, dried fish, and oysters—and a menagerie of dogs, cats, and monkeys.
After leaving San Francisco on June 26, 1900, to return to Asia, the ship’s surgeon, James Moloney, documented one of the most contentious cases of an already contentious year. In his ship’s logs, the surgeon said the Coptic picked up passengers in Honolulu, then headed for Japan. When the ship reached the port of Kobe, a steerage passenger was found mortally ill with fever.6
Ah Sow, a twenty-seven-year-old rice farmer from a plantation outside Honolulu, had a temperature of 105 degrees and an egg-size lump erupting from his thigh. Carried ashore in the wee hours, the man died as “the first case of plague occurring in the history of the Pacific Ocean on an outward bound ship,” Moloney said.7
On the steerage deck near the dead man’s berth, inspectors found three dead rats in the scuppers. A frenzy of finger-pointing ensued. The ship’s surgeon blamed the passenger Ah Sow for bringing plague aboard the Coptic from Hawaii.8 Honolulu health officers insisted that plague rats already on the ship from San Francisco had infected Ah Sow.
While health officers of California, Hawaii, and the shipping company wrangled, the Coptic, now scrubbed and fumigated, raced waves and weather to cross the Pacific again. When she next reached San Francisco Bay, Kinyoun was away, up north inspecting quarantine stations in Canada. He left the San Francisco station in the hands of an experienced officer, who scrutinized the Coptic’s freight and passengers to howls of protest over the delay.